In­tensely Hot Gas Cre­ates Se­ri­ously Cool Light-Show

Physi­cist Eric Dono­van stared in sur­prise at the pho­tos which Cana­dian am­a­teur astronomers showed him. He saw a bright rib­bon that looked like an aurora, only ver­ti­cal, and im­me­di­ately de­cided to look into the phe­nom­e­non. Satel­lite data re­vealed that the rib­bon is al­most 26 km wide and stretches thou­sands of km over Canada. It's made of ionised, (elec­tri­cally charged) gas high up in the at­mos­phere. In­cred­i­bly, this gas can be up to 6,000 °C hot – the same tem­per­a­ture as in Earth’s core. Dono­van is now try­ing to find the ori­gin of this "hot air".